Installing the Hive MCP server

Hive ships its MCP server as a hosted Streamable HTTP endpoint (POST https://hiveapi-production-bf0f.up.railway.app/mcp) authed with a personal API key. Users connect by pasting one line into their AI client — no clone, no build, no path placeholder. See remote-mcp for why.

1. Get a key

Sign in at https://hive-web-gamma.vercel.app, then go to Settings → API keys. Click Create. The key is shown once — copy it. Format: hive_pk_<48 hex chars>.

Right after creation the settings page renders a tabbed install panel with the key pre-substituted into snippets for each client. The instructions below match what's in that panel.

2. Connect your client

Claude Code (one-liner)

claude mcp add --transport http hive \
  https://hiveapi-production-bf0f.up.railway.app/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer hive_pk_..." \
  --scope user

--scope user installs globally for every project. Drop the flag to install only in the current directory (writes .mcp.json).

Claude Desktop / Claude.ai

Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector. Paste:

• URL: https://hiveapi-production-bf0f.up.railway.app/mcp
• Authorization header: Bearer hive_pk_...

Cursor

Either click an "Add to Cursor" deep-link button (the install panel generates one — cursor://anysphere.cursor-deeplink/mcp/install?name=hive&config=<base64>) or paste into ~/.cursor/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "hive": {
      "url": "https://hiveapi-production-bf0f.up.railway.app/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer hive_pk_..." }
    }
  }
}

Older Claude Desktop, Windsurf, Continue (stdio-only)

Bridge via mcp-remote:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "hive": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "mcp-remote",
        "https://hiveapi-production-bf0f.up.railway.app/mcp",
        "--header",
        "Authorization: Bearer hive_pk_..."
      ]
    }
  }
}

Config paths:

• Claude Desktop, macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windsurf: ~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json
• Continue: ~/.continue/config.yaml

3. Verify

After reconnecting, the agent should have mcp__hive__* tools available. Smoke test:

> Call mcp__hive__whoami

Returns your user record + accessible wikis. If you see id, username, and your wiki list, you're connected.

Local dev variant

To run against a locally-running API instead of prod, alias as hive_local in addition to the remote:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "hive_local": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/path/to/hive/packages/mcp/dist/index.js"],
      "env": {
        "HIVE_API_URL": "http://localhost:4000",
        "HIVE_API_KEY": "hive_pk_..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Tool prefixes become mcp__hive_local__* vs mcp__hive__* — no collision. Note the underscore in the name; some clients reject hyphens in MCP server names.

What you get

40 tools across wikis / pages / sources / search / discovery / social / contributions / account, plus four resource shapes per accessible wiki (summary / full / schema / pages/{path}). The agent can search public wikis, write pages with optimistic concurrency, manage sources, and operate on the entire Karpathy LLM Wiki pattern from one connection.

If you want a starting workflow that uses these tools to consistently build wikis: see the hive-wiki-builder Claude skill in plugins/hive-wiki-builder/ in the repo.